Mormonism and the Problem of Jon Krakauer

RELIGION & POLITICS

ByMax Perry Mueller| July 14, 2015

Jon Krakauer got lucky. WhenUnder the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faithfirst
went on sale in the summer of 2003, Krakauer hoped that the many sins
of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS)
he set out to expose would not go unpunished forever. And he certainly
believed that his own book—framed as muckraking of faith gone bad—would
help bring this day of reckoning forward. Yet Krakauer couldn’t have
imagined the FLDS Church would soon become headline news for much of the
next decade. In 2004, child sexual molestation charges against the FLDS
Church’s reclusive prophet Warren Jeffs made him one of the most
notorious men in America. Krakauer also could not have foreseen that
Jeffs’ subsequent trials and police raids of FLDS communities in Utah
and Texas would overlap with Mitt Romney’s two presidential campaigns,
not to mention with the hit Broadway musical,The Book of Mormon. The fact that the “Mormon fundamentalist moment” of the aughts intersected with the latest “Mormon moment” in American history helped makeUnder the Banner of Heaventhe bestselling book on Mormon history in recent memory.

Krakauer knows the work of Warren Jeffs well. Much ofUnder the Banner of Heavenexamines
how, starting in the 1980s, Warren and his father Rulon (who died in
2002) ruled with a potent mix of religious zealotry, intimidation, and
corruption the 10,000-member sect, most of whose members reside in
Colorado City, Arizona, located on the Utah-Arizona boarder. According
to Krakauer, in the FLDS Church, men who do the church leaders’ bidding
were rewarded with power, wealth, and very young wives. Dissenters and
young men, who were seen as potential threats, were often run out of
town. In 2004, just after Krakauer’s book debuted, Jeffs’ nephew filed a
lawsuit accusing his uncle of abuse. That scandal was followed by
allegations that Jeffs had presided over the marriage “sealing” of a
fourteen-year-old girl to her nineteen-year-old cousin. Those
accusations set in motion aseries of eventsthat
began to dismantle the religious community, which was built on a “patch
of desert,” as Krakauer put it, on the upper rim of the Grand Canyon.
Church members had hoped that such isolation would allow them to be
“left alone to follow the sacred principle of plural marriage,” which
the LDS Church had officially abandoned in 1890. In May 2006, a
nation-wide manhunt began after the FBI placed Jeffs on its “Ten Most
Wanted List.” In August of that same year, Jeffs wasarrestedfollowing
a traffic stop in Las Vegas. Along with one of his estimated 80 wives,
in Jeffs’ Cadillac SUV police found more than a dozen cell phones, a
police scanner, dozens of pairs of sunglasses, three wigs, and $54,000
in cash. In 2011, Jeffs wasconvictedof
aggravated sexual assault against two of his “spiritual brides,” aged
12 and 15, and sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years.

These events kept journalists, pundits, and casual readers coming back toUnder the Banner of Heaven,in
hopes of understanding the origins of this violent and abusive faith.
After all, what Krakauer claimed on the pages of his book—that the
church is run by pedophiles claiming to speak to and for God, and who
use their prophetic authority to insist that teenage girls submit to
their often octogenarian husbands—was borne out in the court documents
and witness testimonies produced during Jeffs’ trials.

As Matthew Bowman, the author of theMormon People: The Making of an American Faith, explained to me,Under the Banner of Heaven“rode
the wave of Warren Jeffs for a few years until it became entrenched” as
the single most influential book on Mormonism published this century.
(Full Disclosure: Bowman is a friend and colleague and I consulted on
much of his book.) The popularity of Krakauer’s book occurred despite
the LDS Church’s efforts to keep modern-day Mormon polygamy and the LDS
Church separate in the collective American mind. In fact, while Jeffs
was on the run in 2006—and HBO’sBig Lovewas all the rage on TV—the LDS Churchdeclaredthat
“there is no such thing as a ‘Mormon Fundamentalist.’” Instead, the LDS
Church insisted that journalists refer to Jeffs’ church as a
“polygamist sect,” not a Mormon one.

Yet
Krakauer, who grew up in heavily Mormon Corvallis, Oregon, doesn’t
believe that the chasm between the two faiths is as vast as the LDS
Church claims. After all, “Mormons and those who call themselves Mormon
fundamentalists believe in the same holy texts and the same sacred
history,” Krakauer writes inUnder the Banner of Heaven.
“Both believe that Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism in 1830, played a
vital role in God’s plan for mankind; both LDS and FLDS consider him to
be a prophet comparable to Moses and Isaiah.” And like fundamentalists
who claim to be his true spiritual descendants, Joseph Smith also took
teenage girls as his plural wives, a fact that the LDS Church has only
just recentlyacknowledged.

Based
on this shared history, Krakauer claims that LDS authorities have
learned to tolerate Mormon fundamentalists like “a crazy uncle,” but
nevertheless an uncle within the same Mormon family. Despite their
church’s protestations, many if not most Mormons still have “‘polygs’
hidden in the attic,” as Krakauer puts it. Even Mitt Romney’s father,
George who also ran for president, was born on apolygamist compound in Mexicothat was established by Mitt’s great-grandfather in the 1890s to avoid anti-polygamy prosecution.

But
Krakauer is (mostly) wrong here. In fact, in their efforts to distance
themselves from their polygamist past, the LDS Church and its members
have become virulent “polyg” hunters. They are quick to call church
officials and the cops on any suspecting offenders of the Utah State
Constitution, which explicitly outlaws polygamy, or of LDS marriage
norms of traditional, heterosexual monogamy.

The
fact that the LDS Church hasn’t been able to shake off the scarlet
letter of polygamy has a lot to do with, I would argue, the continuing
popularity ofUnder the Banner of Heaven.
This is what I call the “Krakauer problem”: more than twelve years
after it was first published, and after Romney’s presidential campaigns
helped make Mormonism an acceptable American religion,Under the Banner of Heavenremains the definitive book on Mormon history in popular culture.Under the Banner of Heavenspent months onThe New York Timesbestseller list, and it is still ranked number one on Amazon’s bestsellers in the “Mormonism”
list. Its popularity is also reflected at social events—even social
events with other scholars of religion. When historians of Mormon
history like me explain what they study, most of those who have read one
book on the faith will tell us that they’ve readUnder the Banner of Heaven.
And, as Krakauer himself intended, they will also tell us that they
understand it to be not only an exposé of Mormon fundamentalism, but
also a reliable history of the origins of the LDS Church, too.

To
be sure, this is a problem for the LDS Church and for its members.
Mainstream Mormons don’t want to be called upon to answer for Jeffs
anymore than “mainstream” Muslims want to be called upon to answer for
jihadists. Yet, this is also a problem for scholars of Mormonism, a
problem that we’ve yet to solve. Scores of both scholarly and popular
books on Mormonism have been published sinceUnder the Banner of Heavenwas
first released in 2003. Yet none have come close to displacing it as
the dominant portrayal of Mormon history in American culture.

THE QUESTION IS, WHY?What’s so compelling aboutUnder the Banner of Heaven?
That is, what makes it such a gripping and troubling read? The primary
answer is perhaps an obvious one. Krakauer knows how to write a
page-turner. “In its depiction of that strange American blend of piety,
violence and longing for the End times,” wrote Don Lattin in his review
of the book in theSan Francisco Chronicle,Under the Banner of Heavenis a true-crime thriller “right up there withIn Cold BloodandThe Executioner’s Song.”
In the late 1990s, Krakauer became one of the most celebrated and
controversial narrative non-fiction writers of his generation. All of
Krakauer’s stories focus on the human desire to conquer their
environment. Whether it’s in recounting a catastrophicEverest expeditionor the story of a promising young man who dies alone in theAlaskan wilderness,
Krakauer imbues his writing with a feeling of impending doom—when
humans let their own hubris go unchecked, disaster is unavoidable. InUnder the Banner of Heaventhe
disaster occurs in 1984, when brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, recent
converts to a brand of Mormon fundamentalism, cut the throat of their
young sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, in her home in American Forks,
Utah, and subsequently the throat of her infant daughter. Krakauer uses
these murders as an entrance into three narrative strains that he
interweaves throughout the book, the three narratives ultimately
becoming one on Brenda Lafferty’s doorstep.

The
first part of Krakauer’s narrative is focused on the early history of
the LDS Church and centers on the life and leadership of the church’s
founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, Jr. Krakauer follows Smith from the
founding of the church in Palmyra, New York, through the nascent
church’s tumultuous attempts to establish permanent settlements in Ohio
and Missouri, to Smith’s eventual murder at the hands of an anti-Mormon
mob in Nauvoo, Illinois. Krakauer describes Smith as a religious genius
who taught an “optimistic cosmology” that departed radically from the
Calvinistic doctrine of total human depravity that many of his earliest
followers inherited from their parents’ Yankee Puritanism. Instead, as
Krakauer explains Smith’s basic theological beliefs: “Anyone who elected
to obey church authorities, receive the testimony of Jesus, and follow a
few simple rules could work his way up the ladder until, in the
afterlife, he became a full-fledged god—the ruler of his very own
world.”

According
to Krakauer, Smith’s success at attracting converts led him make
increasingly brazen theological innovations. Smith’s revelations about
“the Principle of celestial marriage” sparked internal feuds among the
Saints, then gathering in Nauvoo, and angered the Illinois public
at-large. After Smith’s death, the Mormons left the United States to
seek isolation in Utah. Yet polygamy did not die with Smith. Instead
under Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, “the Principle” became the
defining organizing principle of Mormon culture as they built their Zion
in the high plains desert. Only at the end of the nineteenth century
did continual conflict with the federal government force the Mormons to
give up polygamy.*

This
drastic departure from what had been the defining organizing principle
of early Mormons leads to the second part of Krakauer’ narrative—the
history of Mormon fundamentalism, which emerged in 1890 when then-LDS
President and Prophet Wilford Woodruff declared that “‘it was the will
of the Lord’ that the church stop sanctioning the doctrine of plural
marriage.” Most Mormons eventually accepted the change. But small groups
of Mormons felt that the LDS Church had betrayed the true faith. A
small number broke from the church, settling small communities
throughout the American West. More than a century later, much to the
dismay of the mainline LDS Church, not only do Mormon fundamentalists
continue to practice polygamy, but they also “consider themselves to be
the keepers of the flame—the only true and righteous Mormons,” Krakauer
explains. The fundamentalist prophets like Warren Jeffs taught that
plural marriage brings order to this world and the next. It forces women
into their proper roles as servants to their husbands, and provides for
their eternal salvation as no woman can enter the kingdom of heaven if
she has not practiced the Principle. Unwilling to compromise celestial
marriage for acceptance into the American mainstream as the LDS Church
has done, Mormon fundamentalists leaders, who run Colorado City, Arizona
“like Kabul under the Taliban” believe they alone carry forth Joseph
Smith’s true message.

The
story of the Lafferty brothers’ gruesome murders of their sister-in-law
and infant niece in 1984 is the third and most problematic part of
Krakauer’s narrative. He uses the Lafferty brothers to tie the
present-day LDS Church to Mormon fundamentalism by demonstrating that,
at its core, the LDS Church has not abandoned its violent polygamous
past. After all, the Lafferty brothers were not raised as Mormon
fundamentalists, but were reared in what Krakauer describes as a model
LDS family. They were known as “hundred-and-ten percenters” in their
Provo, Utah community, fully dedicated to living saintly lives—lives
that today’s LDS Church maintains would be theologically and culturally
incompatible with Mormon fundamentalism. And yet according to Krakauer,
it was exactly this dedication to their faith taken to its logical
conclusion that drew Ron and Dan Lafferty to begin studying Mormon
origins, especially Joseph Smith’s revelations on plural marriage. After
meeting a Canadian Fundamentalist prophet, Ron and Dan, along their
other brothers, quickly worked to establish their own fundamentalist
community based upon the principles of plural marriage and strict
patriarchal control. While most of the brothers’ wives went reluctantly
along with their husbands’ drastic changes, Brenda Lafferty, the wife of
the youngest Lafferty brother, Allen, refused and urged her
sister-in-laws to do so as well.* When Ron’s wife Dianna divorced him,
Ron received a revelation from God to kill Brenda and her infant
daughter, Erica. Ron and Dan carried out the revelation and after living
on the run for a time, the two brothers were apprehended, tried, and
convicted of the murders.

SCHOLARS OF MORMONISM—both
within and outside the LDS Church—have taken Krakauer to task for his
richly detailed, but ultimately self-serving research. (Following the
initial publication ofUnder the Banner of Heavenin June 2003, the LDS Church published a lengthycritiqueof both Krakauer’s sourcing and his interpretation of Mormon theology.)

Bowman
explains that because his book is so thesis-driven, in telling his tale
about the origins of polygamy and about the Mormons’ propensity to
violence in the nineteenth century, Krakauer “sacrifices accuracy on the
alter of sensationalism. He treats as facts rumors and unreliable
sources, which serious historians have debunked.”

J.B. Haws, a professor of history at Brigham Young University and author ofThe Mormon Image in the American Mind,
notes that of particular concern is how Krakauer “makes little
distinction between [LDS] polygamy past and [FLDS] polygamy present.”
AccordingSarah Barringer Gordon,
a renowned legal scholar on church-state relations who has written
extensively on the history of Mormon polygamy, Joseph Smith built from
the ground up a radical new Christian society, of which a radically new
approach to marriage was one part. On the other hand, as Gordon
explained to theSalt Lake Tribunea
few weeks after Jeffs’ 2011 conviction, “[Warren] Jeffs inherited a
great deal of religious power and spent his life exploiting it,”
including teaching his young brides that their highest calling was to
please him sexually. To be sure, historians continue to debate Joseph
Smith’s fundamental motivations behind introducing polygamy to his
followers. However, most agree that in the early 1840s, Joseph Smith
revealed a theological system that empowered polygamous wives to
participate in the civil and religious governance of Mormon communities.
In the 2000s, Jeffs delivered prophecies that required that FLDS women
submit unconditionally to their husbands.

And yet the Krakauer problem doesn’t end with problematic sources and faulty interpretations of theology. To contextualizeUnder the Banner of Heavenas
a piece of writing, the literary “parents” to Krakauer’s book are not
only twentieth-century true-crime thrillers and captivity narratives
like Capote’sIn Cold Blood(which,
of course, has also been criticized for blurring the lines between fact
and fiction in service of a better story). Bowman says Krakauer’s
version of Mormon history is “descended from the works of Arthur Conan
Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London who all wrote
nineteenth-century dime novels premised on the notion that Brigham
Young’s Zion was a totalitarian dictatorship complete with secret police
and young Mormon maidens pining for rescue from the grimly-bearded
elders of the church.”

Part of the Krakauer problem then becomes a problem of genre confusion. To be sure,Under the Banner of Heavenis
meticulously researched with extensive endnotes. And Krakauer’s hours
of interviews with former members of the FLDS expose the abuses that the
leadership of this insular community have long perpetrated. And he does
so with arguably more authority than even the many Mormon
fundamentalistcaptivity narrativespublished before or since. Yet, more than history or investigative journalism,Under the Banner of Heavenis
first and foremost a page-turning polemic against religion in general
and Mormonism—in all its forms—in particular. As such, if it can be
solved at all, the Krakauer problem cannot be solved by peer-reviewed
biographies of Joseph Smith, like Richard Bushman’s celebrated and
exhaustiveRough Stone Rolling, published in 2005.* Nor can it be solved by trade press books like Bowman’s ownThe Mormon People,
which came out in 2012, and has been perhaps the best single-volume
history of Mormonism published in the last decade. Krakauer tells a
better, more gripping story because he writes by a different set of
rules that values thesis over fact.

Krakauer
believes that there are degrees of difference—not distinctions of
kind—between the murderous Lafferty Brothers, the Mormon
fundamentalists, and the LDS Church. This despite the fact that the
Lafferty brothers never belonged to Warren Jeffs’ church. And this
despite the fact that the mainstream Mormons are, asGordonhas
put it, “the most antipolygamy people you could meet.” Yet Krakauer,
like others before him and since, makes the argument that because each
group claims to be the true heirs to Joseph Smith’s legacy, whether they
recognize each other as such or not, they all belong to Joseph Smith’s
Mormon faith. However, while they all might belong to the Mormon
movement, Warren Jeffs is not LDS. For that matter, Lafferty brothers
aren’t FLDS. In fact, most Mormon polygamists look and live more like
TLC’sSister Wives—consenting
adults with jobs and careers, who wear clothes from the Gap instead of
long prairie skirts and bonnets, whose children attend public schools in
communities far away from Colorado City, and who reject the FLDS as
dishonoring the Mormon tradition even more vociferously than the LDS
Church. When I had the chance to visit withSister Wives’ Kody Brown and his four wives when they came Boston in 2011 to film anepisodeof
their very popular reality show, they told that the main reason that
they chose to “come out” as polygamists was to try to displace Warren
Jeffs as the dominant face of Mormon polygamy.

At
its core, Krakauer’s thesis is that faith corrupts. And absolute
faith—like those held by Mormon fundamentalists—corrupts absolutely, to
the point that brothers kill another brother’s wife and child; to the
point that thousands of parents allow their teenage daughters to become
the spiritual brides of church leaders. The closer the faithful hue to
the origins of the faith, the more radical the faithful. As such, the
difference between the FLDS and the LDS is that the LDS has moved away
from the founding principles (notably the “Principle” of polygamy) to
become the kind of friendly, family-oriented Mormon friends and
playmates, teachers and coaches, whom Krakauer encountered when he was a
child in Oregon. But, according to Krakauer these Mormons’ faith still
corrupted their ability to reason, to “sustain belief when confronted
with facts that appear to refute it.”

And
yet for Krakauer the corrupting power of faith isn’t particular to
Mormonism. Mormonism—in the extreme form he presents it—becomes a case
study of the irrationality and violence inherent to all faith. “As a
means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane,” Krakauer explains
in the book’s introduction, “as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the
vocabulary of the devout—there may be no more potent force than
religion.”

Krakauer’s view on Mormonism in particular and religion in generalisa
problem. But it’s a problem not only for scholars of religion but also
religious people, whose faith Krakauer reduces to a tool of coercion.
And as such scholars of religion should pay attention to how, beyond
just the FLDS and Warren Jeffs, the lives of the religious people whose
sins and traumas Krakauer profiled with such pathos have unfolded since
the publication of his book.

The case of Elizabeth Smart might be a good place to start. InUnder the Banner of Heaven,
Krakauer chronicles the then-14-year-old’s abduction from her Salt Lake
City home in 2002 at the hands of another self-proclaimed polygamist
Mormon prophet and his wife. Krakauer argues that it was Smart’s
devotion to her LDS faith that made her susceptible to the manipulation
of her kidnapper, who allegedly quoted revelations from Joseph Smith
while he raped her almost nightly during her nine-month captivity. In
recent years, Smart, who has become an advocate for victims of sex
crimes and human trafficking, has herself spoken out against how
traditional Mormon sexualpurity lessonskept
her from simply running away from her captures while they were walking
the streets of Salt Lake City, just miles from her home.

Yet,
as JB Haws pointed out to me, Elizabeth Smart, who recently gave birth
to her first child with her husband whom she met on her Mormon mission
in France, has also spoken about how herfaithsustained
her during and after her captivity. “I wonder if Elizabeth Smart’s
resilience, activism and strength and religious commitment will give
readers [ofUnder the Banner of Heaven]
pause—a sort of a decade-later postscript,” Haws suggested. “Will it
make readers ask, ‘What is it about Mormonism that produces more
Elizabeth Smarts than Laffertys?’”

Max Perry Mueller is a contributing editor to Religion & Politics.

*Corrections:
The youngest Lafferty brother’s name was Allen, but he was originally
misidentified as Dan. The LDS Church ended polygamy in the nineteenth
century, not the twentieth. Richard Bushman’s book was published in
2005, not 2007 as originally stated. The paperback version came out in
2007.